At Dior, Icing on the Cake

Sugary pastel eyeliner made from strips of satin conjures worlds of romance and solace.

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Backstage at Dior’s spring 2015 show, where the creative and image director of Dior Makeup, Peter Philips, created subtle drama with adhesive strips across the eyelids.CreditSchohaja

Ersatz skin and “invisible makeup” ruled the runways of spring 2015, making any exception shine hard. At Raf Simons’s Dior, the models came out looking monochrome and very nearly naked-eyed, until a blink or the flash of a camera revealed a crescent moon of color above the lash and each artificial glimmer of pink, peach, lemon or pistachio to be an adhesive strip of laser-cut satin. In fewer words: a sticker, albeit one that looks good enough to scratch and sniff.

The illusion first appeared in 2011, when Dior launched a collection of adhesive eyeliners in various shapes of black velvet. For spring 2015, Peter Philips, the creative and image director of Christian Dior Makeup, requested the same technology be applied in fresh pastels: “This kind of satin looks a little bit like neoprene” — a favorite fabric of Simons’s — “and in these very couture, very subtle colors. It’s something you can wear in the daytime.” If a Dior couture dress is a four-layer cake in the tearoom, a set of Dior “Pastel Eyes” multiwear eyeliner patches is four macarons bought to go.

Philips is very convincing on the properties of atelier satin and “special” adhesive. However, the makeup hasn’t yet launched, and I am on more like a Jordan almonds budget. Somewhere in my apartment I find a pair of either nail or eyebrow scissors, a clean bit of surface at my table and a roll of Johnson & Johnson cloth tape I originally bought for a stiletto blister, and after 10 minutes of feeling as domestically competent as Catherine Deneuve in “Repulsion” (1965), I surprise my reflection with almost-symmetrical eyeliner in cow’s-milk white. My face looks like the ’60s: optimistic.

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Clockwise from top left: a model at Dior with sticker eyeliner and “invisible makeup”; Dior Pastel Eyes Kingdom of Colors (limited edition), $61, available at dior.com from January 2015; the finished look; Philips at work.CreditSchohaja

It is not very subtle, my version of Philips’s innovation. Nor is it very couture. But in combining a material of solace with the aim of beauty, I am accidentally repeating a history of artifice and craft that is almost as French as pastels and a little less sweet. Because while it’s true that Dior invented the patch as a style of eyeliner, it’s also true that 300 years earlier, Frenchwomen popularized the patch as a fix for all kinds of unbeautiful marks. Often, these marks were left by smallpox, the damage of which was intractable even when the disease was cured, and so the 18th-century upper-class women who were the likeliest survivors were also — by several historical accounts — the likeliest originators of a strategic form of facial decoration known as patchwork. In France and later in England, many women and some men made a daily ritual of snipping silk, velvet or leather into hearts, stars, dots and other shapes, to be applied with a brush and some glue.

By the end of the 18th century, patchwork had become less remedial and even more self-conscious, a marker of style — or status — with or without a pockmark behind it. Even the placing of patches had attained a little magicky significance: A heart-shaped patch on the left cheek said you were engaged, while a heart-shaped patch on the right said you were married, and a patch on the breast was said to be the mark of a murderess. As for a patch by the eye? A sign of passion, allegedly.

To count yourself as “passionate” this side of the millennium is unfashionable enough, and to look passionate is basically unthinkable. In pistachio or lemon or peach or pink you couldn’t think about it even if you tried, so deeply anti-passionate is any color that derives its character entirely from being mixed with white. Pastels are laced with an attenuated strain of cool, a distant femininity: Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, Paris Hilton as Paris in miniature. Also: princesses, grandmothers. Still there is a kitsch loveliness about the idea of a patch over the lash line to light up a face and signal a new kind of passion, with a wink.